Well, of course I'm skeptical. I have as hard a time believing that Studio Ghibli will simply close its doors and become little more than a clearinghouse for its own IP than I have a hard time believing I myself will die. There was never a time during my own awareness of anime as a medium and an art form that Studio Ghibli didn't exist, and now I am faced with the very real possibility that might no longer be the case. When you take the shop that gave us Totoro and Ashitaka and San and Nausicaa and Chihiro and you close their doors, it's like someone told you the North Star went missing, or that someone else just drunk the last milkshake in the world. Of course I'm skeptical. Of course I'm scared.
But the studio itself admitted that the future of the company depended on When Marnie Was There doing well. And when it opened in Japan to weak numbers — beaten out by the likes of a new Pokémon movie and Disney's live-action Maleficent -- all I could think was: Irony of ironies, all is irony. Marnie did barely half the business of the 2010 Ghibli release The Secret World of Arrietty, and the general perception in Japan is that Ghibli's work is now old-fashioned stuff, and not in a good way. Small wonder they have lost out to the very studio that indirectly inspired much of their work, and to one of the more recent generations of product that competed directly for its audience.
Better to burn out than to fade away?
In truth, I never imagined it might end like this. I expected Hayao Miyazaki to retire after having directed Princess Mononoke, as he had planned, and to pass the reins to one of the other animators under his wing. Part of that plan had been scotched when director Yoshifumi Kondō, director of the wonderful Whisper of the Heart, the man Miyazaki had been most directly grooming for the top spot, died in 1998 after working on Mononoke. Miyazaki came back out of retirement, gave us more films, gave his own son two directorial projects (one not so good, the other quite good). But with Kondō's death, it did feel like something Miyazaki believed to be irreplaceable had died as well.
Or maybe Miyazaki himself would have died, and the studio would have been forced to either forge ahead or close up its doors once and for all. That, I feared, would have been the most likely route: even with Ghibli insisting on personal time for its employees (something instigated in the wake of Kondō's own death), Miyazaki's workaholic behavior seemed likely to kill him as well.
What I did not expect, and in a way what I dreaded the most, was a slow trickle down the drain into irrelevancy — having Studio Ghibli go from one of Japan's living treasures to a living fossil. Because I myself still didn't believe that was the case, even with me writing all this from the other side of the world and only seeing Ghibli's productions by the grace of Disney or GKIDS. From Up on Poppy Hill was good-to-great, and Arrietty was also good-to-great, and it still seemed like the Ghibli gang could pull out the magic when it was demanded of them. They still believed there was an audience for a simple, straightforward, well-told story dusted with a little magic (or, sometimes, powdered with a whole lot of magic). As did I.
But even I couldn't ignore how the studio's projects were turning that much more into hearkenings back and not great leaps forward. The adventure was being replaced with nostalgia, the kind of nostalgia that men in their fifties and seventies get stuck in, and resent others for not identifying with. Was there a single moment in Poppy Hill, fine as it was, that matched the exhilaration of seeing Chihiro on the back of that dragon as it shed all its scales? Something had, indeed, gone missing — and over time it seemed it had gone missing for keeps.
Even as I denied how Miyazaki's looming retirement would be the beginning of the end in any sense you could imagine, I could see the evidence mount up. Like it or not, the studio was Miyazaki — not just in the sense that his creativity was what had breathed life into so much of its work, but in that it was all but impossible to look in from the outside and not identify everything being done in its name with him on some level. Even when he didn't sit in the director's chair, his presence could be felt on everything that came out of the studio.
And what a joy that was! What a great contrast it made to an industry where the rest of the product grew all the more impersonal, indifferent, insular, and interchangeable with each passing year. But with that joy also came unease, the unease of knowing everything that made Ghibli unique also made it fragile. A Ghibli without Miyazaki would most likely no longer be Ghibli; an anime world without Ghibli would cease to be anime as we knew it.
Let the ashes scatter; let new things arise
if Ghibli's time has indeed passed, there's no sense in turning away from it and clutching our DVD box sets to our chests for succor. A Ghibli that works as a nostalgia merchant instead of a vital cultural force isn't the Ghibli that we deserve — and isn't the Ghibli that Ghibli deserves, either.
If these indeed are the last days of Studio Ghibli, here is all I ask.
First, let those of us on this side of the Pacific see the rest of the catalog properly. Get Disney and GKIDS and anyone else with an interest in licensing their material to re-release titles like Princess Mononke and Spirited Away and Pom Poko and all the other titles that only had a pressing on DVD. Bring out the things we never had released domestically, like I Can Hear the Sea or Only Yesterday.
Second — and in some ways, even more important — let's learn the right lessons from the Ghibli crew. We don't have to see movies that superficially resemble their work, with the same art style and the same tropes. Makoto Shinkai did that with Children who Chase Lost Voices; the result was lofty boredom and gorgeous tedium. Instead, let's see productions that dig deeper into the spirit of what they did — works that see the world through the eyes of both children and adults; works that have something that speaks to everyone in the audience, no matter how old or young; works that employ meticulous craftsmanship and leverage observation of life as it's actually lived, not simply the recycling of tropes most familiar to a self-selecting, insular fanbase.
If we must lose Ghibli, all that I ask is for its spirit to scatter itself far and wide, and to rejuvenate all that it touches — for its ending to be a beginning to things we could never have imagined while it still existed.
